Mobile electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and digital cellular telephones are increasingly used for electronic commerce (e-commerce) and mobile commerce (m-commerce). Programs that execute on the mobile devices to implement e-commerce and/or m-commerce functionality may need to operate in a secure mode to reduce the likelihood of attacks by malicious programs (e.g., virus programs) and to protect sensitive data.
For security reasons, at least some processors provide two levels of operating privilege: a first level of privilege for user programs; and a higher level of privilege for use by the operating system. However, the higher level of privilege may or may not provide adequate security for m-commerce and e-commerce, given that this higher level relies on proper operation of operating systems with highly publicized vulnerabilities. In order to address security concerns, some mobile equipment manufacturers implement yet another third level of privilege, or secure mode, that places less reliance on corruptible operating system programs, and more reliance on hardware-based monitoring and control of the secure mode. An example of one such system may be found in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003/0140245, entitled “Secure Mode for Processors Supporting MMU and Interrupts.”
In addition to this secure mode, various hardware-implemented security firewalls and other security monitoring components have been added to the processing systems used in mobile electronic devices to further reduce the vulnerability to attacks. Examples of these security improvements may be found in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/961,756, entitled “System and Method for Secure Mode for Processors and Memories on Multiple Semiconductor Dies Within a Single Semiconductor Package,” Ser. No. 10/961,755, entitled “Method and System of Ensuring Integrity of a Secure Mode Entry Sequence,” Ser. No. 10/961,344, entitled “System and Method of Identifying and Preventing Security Violations Within a Computing System,” Ser. No. 10/961,748, entitled “Method and System of Verifying Proper Execution of a Secure Mode Entry Sequence,” and European Patent Application EP 04292405.0, entitled “Method and System for Detecting a Security Violation Using an Error Correction Code,” all of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
In some systems, Direct Memory Access (DMA) components are implemented to enable subsystems (e.g., a display subsystem, a camera subsystem, a modem subsystem or a processing subsystem) to communicate with each other via DMA “channels”. Unfortunately, DMA channels are subject to security attacks that enable malicious hackers to break the secure mode described above without being detected by the hardware firewalls. Breaking the secure mode enables a malicious user to change a mobile electronic device's International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) or defeat a Subscriber Identity Module Lock (SIMLOCK) mechanism.